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Behavioral aspects of decision-making on payments to owners: review of studies
The topic of payout policy significance in terms of value creation has been developing for 50 years already. This development has led to the establishment classic theories that explain different patterns in the companies’ payout policy choices: signaling, agency costs theory, clientele theory and catering theory. However, tests results are not always consistent among different authors, which means that these theories cannot be used universally. Classic theories assume that all agents on the market are fully rational, which is rather unrealistic. These two facts led to the development of behavioral explanation of the payout policy choice. This approach focuses on the behavioral characteristics of managers that are responsible for the decision-making process in the company. Thus, the payout policy according to this approach is considered as the function of behavioral characteristics of managers (overconfidence, optimism, risk preferences, etc.) rather than the function of the financial variables.
This particular article is the review of researches that cover classic and modern theories of payout policy. The article covers the logic of the development of different views on the payout policy. The author covers articles that test different theories, analyzes main results and conclusions, investigates the reasons for the development of these theories. The main focus has been made on the behavioral approach which is considered as the most fruitful direction for the future research. The authors also cover the methodology of existing papers, variables that measure behavioral characteristics and results.